


to my heart he carries the key

by glitteratiglue



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Description Heavy, Domestic, M/M, Post-Canon, Romance, Tea, spoilers for the lost future of pepperharrow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23598331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: Thaniel traced the window glass, steamed by the cold, making feathered patterns there. He wasn’t aware of how long he’d been standing there until Mori’s soft tread sounded at his back.[A conversation of sorts, some months after The Lost Future of Pepperharrow].
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 7
Kudos: 59





	to my heart he carries the key

**Author's Note:**

> I was in bits after finishing this book. After re-reading the ending a bunch of times, I'm still choosing to interpret that Mori's reset somehow knocked out his clairvoyant abilities. That was the way I saw it, anyway.

Thaniel traced the window glass, steamed by the cold, making feathered patterns there. He couldn’t remember the last time his breaths came so easily. Currently, London lacked its usual coating of fog, but he’d never describe the air here as clean. Without the band of tightness that had constricted his chest all last winter, he felt free. He might as well have been one of the unearthly clockwork butterflies he’d seen at Yoruji.

Mori had made several more, in Takiko’s memory. It had given him something to do while he re-established his clientele after such a long absence. The insects would circle around the workshop, their gossamer wings catching the light. Six was delighted with them, naturally. Along with the twittering birds and the fireflies, it made for a crowd. With his height, Thaniel frequently had to duck out of the way of some infernal clockwork creature or other. Katsu would often stretch out a tentacle, hoping to catch one when it flew low, but the wing usually slipped out of his grasp at the last moment. He’d skitter off afterwards, his wheel grinding on the back step as he made his way outside.

He wasn’t aware of how long he’d been standing there until Mori’s soft tread sounded at his back. His clean, lemon scent surrounded Thaniel.

“Kei,” he said, reaching back to find Mori’s hand. Those delicate, yet strong fingers fit between his own as if they belonged there.

“What are your plans for the afternoon?” Mori asked. The richness of his voice threaded golden warmth all along Thaniel's spine. It was a joke, of sorts; Mori’s attempt at gallows humour. Even some years past, he often made these jokes. The old Mori would have seen tendrils of intent, fuzzing or sharpening according to whatever Thaniel might decide.

Thaniel turned around, the movement breaking the connection of their hands. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he answered.

He reached for Mori's shoulder and pressed himself into his touch, feeling a bit like a starved plant left too long in a dark cupboard. Mori's breath hitched in his ear, his hand coming up to rest on Thaniel's waist.

The kettle whistled, making them both turn. “Tea,” Mori said, remembering. He let go and went to deal with it.

“How are you feeling today?” Mori asked, carefully pouring the water over powdered tea, into two cups he had ready. The china clinked as he stirred the tea with a delicate brass spoon, its handle shaped like an octopus.

It was Thaniel’s third week in the clinical trial at UCL, and he couldn’t say it had been easy. There had been some truly alarming side effects. The colourful vomiting had been a particularly unpleasant one ( _“You’d better make friends with this bucket,”_ Six had said blandly as she set it in front of him, touching a hand to Thaniel’s hair so briefly he couldn’t be sure she’d done it at all).

Thaniel made a face. “I’ve been better. Not as bad as yesterday.” His joints ached and he was exhausted. He wasn’t better yet, but against every failure he'd imagined, the treatment was working. In the last week or so, it felt as though the shadow on his lungs had begun to lift. The scritch when he breathed too deeply had gone, and the doctors said the capacity of his lungs would increase over time.

“That’s something, I suppose,” Mori said, a hint of feeling in his eyes when Thaniel met his gaze. Not pity; it would never be pity, not from Keita Mori. It was a kind of sympathy, Thaniel decided, and that, he could live with. It went right down to his bones, settled in that fluttering space beneath his ribs where Mori lived.

The scent of matcha, bitter and comforting, drifted from the cup as Mori passed it to him.

“Thank you,” Thaniel said, trying to shed the thickness that had come into his voice all of a sudden. The whole debacle in Japan had changed him, unfrozen something within he’d thought was long locked away. It wasn’t as though he wore his heart on his sleeve these days, but it was something close to it. Mori wasn’t all that different, except that Thaniel had learned to interpret the language of his long looks and head-tilts and measured silences.

“Why don’t we sit down?” was Mori’s quiet suggestion.

Thaniel let himself be steered to the set of chairs by the fireplace. It flickered in the draught brought on by their movements. With a sigh of relief, he set his teacup on the rickety table between them, and Mori followed suit. Warmth rose from the fire and Thaniel stretched out his hands, rubbed them together.

They both cast an eye at the fireplace as a thump came from the chimney: the Haverley boys, chasing each other up the stairs. The indomitable Mrs Haverley had miraculously added another child to the brood recently. In the background, the baby was grizzling. The high notes of its cries hung in the air in front of Thaniel until they became metallic strands, ephemeral and bright silver.

A slow smile stole over Mori’s face as he realised what was happening. “Is it a good sound?”

“A very good sound,” Thaniel said. “I think it might even inspire a new piece.” His fingers twitched as though they held a pencil. He took a cautious sip of his tea. “I really am feeling much stronger today.”

“Grace tells me the results are encouraging thus far,” was Mori’s mild reply, but his lips formed into a smile. “What does this one look like?”

Thaniel lifted a hand and pretended to draw the looping arcs of notes in the air between them. “Like —” He paused. “Like fine clockwork chain spilling through someone’s hands. But silvery, not gold.”

“The colour is important,” Mori agreed, picking up his own cup to take a drink of tea. There was a twinkle in his eye.

“I never thought I’d live,” Thaniel said out of nowhere. “The years are stretching ahead of me and I hardly know what to do with them.” He hesitated. “I don’t know that I deserve them.”

Mori’s face didn’t change, but Thaniel imagined he could see a shadow beneath that familiar countenance. More than three years past now, Takiko’s sacrifice haunted him still. Thaniel saw his own ghosts reflected in Mori’s eyes, all the webbed lines of the future Mori could have had vanishing in wisps of smoke.

“So many possibilities,” Mori said. “Who knows what might happen?” He set down his cup and leaned in closer, his hand warm and sure where it curved around Thaniel’s shoulder. With a cautious glance into the far distance, he drew their faces together and kissed him.

Heat pulsed through Thaniel, but it never escaped his notice, the way that Mori always checked, how careful he was these days. Mori’s mind ran like well-oiled clockwork, but now it was all painstakingly considered, the springs and cogs of his thoughts no longer gliding against each other as smoothly as they once did. There had been time enough for Mori to grow used to it, and he didn’t seem unhappy. Being reminded of the things he’d forgotten would entertain him. His English was close to what it had been when Thaniel had first met him. Without foreknowledge of possible futures, he was at the mercy of chance just like everybody else. Sometimes Thaniel thought Mori rather enjoyed it, the ability to move through the world with a kind of permanence he’d lacked before.

“Listen,” Mori said. He tilted his shoulders backwards, remaining close enough that his knee brushed against Thaniel’s. “I don’t need to know your future to be certain of your place in our world. The things I forgot, the things I remember — they’re like something from a dream. But I know enough to say you are a good man, who deserves life as much as the next one.”

Thaniel felt the bird-fine bones of Mori’s fingers press to his, briefly, before they relaxed back into their respective chairs.

“Thank you, I think,” Thaniel said. He could say much more, but this would suffice for now. The phantom sensation of touch still clung to his fingers, like one of the strange clairvoyant ghosts Mori had left scattered throughout the world during his former life. Contented, he wrapped his hands around his teacup and lifted it to inhale the grassy steam.

There was a creak: Katsu, climbing up the chair leg. He wound his tentacles around Mori’s forearm, basking in the fire’s glow as they both sipped their tea. From Filigree Street outside, the murmur of familiar voices came closer. Six and Osei, returning from their daily exercise in nearby Mount Street Gardens.

Thaniel might take that much more convincing to be sure his life was as worthy as Mori seemed to think it was. But it belonged to him, all the same, and he had snatched it back with all the fervour of a man who’d spent too long living beneath death’s umbrella. That had to count for something. The thought gleamed in his mind, clear as a polished bell:

Whether he deserved it or not, he _would_ live.


End file.
